Drilling Mars —

New probe to provide InSight into Mars’ interior

Lander, set for 2016 launch, will include drill and seismic sensors.

Mars is set to play host to another robot. The InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission, announced yesterday in a NASA press conference, will launch in March 2016 and land on the red planet on September 20 of the same year. Unlike Curiosity, InSight is a stationary scientific platform, based largely on the highly successful Phoenix probe, but with a much broader mission.

The Mars rovers (Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity) were designed for surface chemistry and geology work, but there are many unknowns when it comes to the Martian interior. Mars occupies a special niche in the Solar System: it is relatively Earth-like in terms of composition and probable internal structure, but smaller and far less tectonically active. (A recent paper has claimed the discovery of Martian tectonic plates, but that assertion is controversial.) In fact, because Mars is less active than Earth, its interior may preserve its history far better than our home world, revealing new insights into the formation and evolution of terrestrial planets.

InSight will contain seismic instruments, heat-flow probes, and gravitational detectors, built by American (JPL), French (CNES), Swiss (ETH), British (Imperial), and German (DLR) laboratories. Together with a powerful drill, these instruments will provide data about Mars' shape, rotational wobble, internal temperature, and density. Particularly, InSight should be able to determine the properties of the planet's core and mantle, through the reflection and refraction of seismic waves through Mars' interior. Coupled with data about the history of water on Mars, this mission should help us gain a more complete picture of the history and structure of terrestrial worlds.

InSight is a Discovery-class mission, a highly successful NASA program initiated in 1992 to send relatively inexpensive robotic craft into space. Other Discovery missions include Dawn (visiting the asteroids Vesta and Ceres), MESSENGER (in Mercury orbit), and Kepler (the exoplanet-hunter).

Unfortunately, budget constraints at NASA limited the number of possible missions to support in this cycle, so in choosing InSight, other equally worthy programs were not funded. With the huge successes of other Discovery probes and the enormous public response to Curiosity's landing, there seems to be a need for more rather than fewer missions. Perhaps InSight will help inspire such an investment, as it probes into the history of our Solar System.

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What NASA needs to start doing is providing a fixed common delivery/surface platform/comms system. With this once done engineering, it allows more money to be funneled into science packages. Packages can then be plugged into the platform and then launched to mars.

The reason we were shooting for grid 8 was because thermographics indicated that grid 9 was compressed iron ferrite. Which means you landed us on a goddamn iron plate!

edit: dammit! Ninja'd by Pirokobo.

@ Pirokobo as well: Gaaaa... I watched that move a couple days ago on TV. I am now dumber for having watched it.

On a side note though, I watched it on a lazy Sunday afternoon with my son. The purpose of that exercise was to point out all the bad physics in that movie and use it as an example to learn a bit about science. Of which this movie has none.

Side side note: I'm glad the tables have turned and we are now the ones probing the martians. Progress!

Ahh, thanks. Never did see that one, all of my friends who saw it at the time wished they hadn't.

It was like Independence Day in that it was basically a string of memorable one-liners punctuated with explosions.

It's ok for Saturday afternoon cheesy sci-fi. The main problem was the budget vs. quality. And Liv Tyler trying for chemistry with Ben Affleck. She's deadweight in any film I've seen her in and I'm most certainly including Jackson's LotR films.

What NASA needs to start doing is providing a fixed common delivery/surface platform/comms system. With this once done engineering, it allows more money to be funneled into science packages. Packages can then be plugged into the platform and then launched to mars.

InSight is based on Phoenix, which itself was based on elements from the Mars Polar Lander and Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander. All comms normally go through UHF uplinks to the three orbiting probes, so those don't change between missions. The surface platform will be determined by what science you want to do on the surface: Curiosity is a rover because it's desired to physically sample as many rocks as possible over a wide geographic distribution. InSight is a lander because all it needs to do is drill a hole and plant a seismograph.

Now that is cool. Look inside the Mars, still hoping manned mission to Mars before I die.

That's why you'll never see it. When you want X out of Washington, you need to ask for X^10, then by the time they get done cutting, compromising, paying for their haircuts, etc, you'll get X/2.

I am not sure what (Manned mission to Mars) ^10 proposal would be. (Manned mission to Jupiter?) I think they can totally do it with Mars to Stay Plan. This idea of sending astronauts to Mars without them returning to earth is much feasible solution without the X^10 budget from current congress.

First: this is awesome. It was too bad that with all the excitement of Curiosity that NASA didn't have the next Mars mission lined up yet (high points like that are the perfect time to hit up Congress).

Sadly, this selection means that the other mission finalists were canceled, including the Titan Mare explorer, which would have been the coolest thing ever: landing in and then floating around one of Titan's liquid methane lakes.

There were a ton of things going against such an ambitious mission meant to be in the cheap Discovery class of missions, but at this rate it doesn't seem like we will have humans visiting other worlds in any of our lifetimes. I would like to at least see scenes broadcast from the surface of other terrestrial bodies before I die...

With the huge successes of other Discovery probes and the enormous public response to Curiosity's landing, there seems to be a need for more rather than fewer missions. Perhaps InSight will help inspire such an investment, as it probes into the history of our Solar System.

I wish, but if Curiosity (a mission that the general public can relate to) doesn't inspire better funding, I can't imagine a static lander could do it either. Like MrMalthus above, I'm a bit cynical and pessimistic about the number and scope of missions (though still excited to see what missions do get funded, and of course their results).

First: this is awesome. It was too bad that with all the excitement of Curiosity that NASA didn't have the next Mars mission lined up yet (high points like that are the perfect time to hit up Congress).

Sadly, this selection means that the other mission finalists were canceled, including the Titan Mare explorer, which would have been the coolest thing ever: landing in and then floating around one of Titan's liquid methane lakes.

There were a ton of things going against such an ambitious mission meant to be in the cheap Discovery class of missions, but at this rate it doesn't seem like we will have humans visiting other worlds in any of our lifetimes. I would like to at least see scenes broadcast from the surface of other terrestrial bodies before I die...

I wonder how much it would cost to establish a bare-bones network of geophysical sensors on planets and moons of interest like Mars + Phobos/Deimos, Vesta, Titan, Europa, and so on. Probably less than the cost of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet here we have a handful of cheap missions killing each other off for funding. I'm sorry to always bring this kind of thing up in these threads, but it's a bad time for science as far as the public's priorities are concerned.

I wonder how much it would cost to establish a bare-bones network of geophysical sensors on planets and moons of interest like Mars + Phobos/Deimos, Vesta, Titan, Europa, and so on. Probably less than the cost of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet here we have a handful of cheap missions killing each other off for funding. I'm sorry to always bring this kind of thing up in these threads, but it's a bad time for science as far as the public's priorities are concerned.

Instead of sending another specialized lander, why don't they just send a package with multiple high-density "rocks" (depleted uranium?) with heat shields on a gravity-assist path around Jupiter terminating in high-velocity impacts on Mars. The MSL could put an "ear" to the ground and listen to the ringing. I'm guessing you wouldn't need particularly sensitive instruments to "hear" the results. (Disclaimer: I don't know what instrumentation MSL has that would be capable of doing this -- if any -- and I'm feeling too lazy to look it up right now.)

Instead of sending another specialized lander, why don't they just send a package with multiple high-density "rocks" (depleted uranium?) with heat shields on a gravity-assist path around Jupiter terminating in high-velocity impacts on Mars.

Because that's wasteful compared to a direct Mars shot with a permanent station equipped with even more instrumentation and observation capabilities. To say nothing of when there would even be a window for an around-Jupiter-back-to-Mars shot.

I was a little bummed out at first. But the science is really timely, as Stern said on the Moon LRO instruments, it does something not done in 40 years (here sufficiently resolved seismology).

Looking at it from my astrobiology interest, we have the tactic and strategic outcome from this choice.

Tactically we now need to know the inner status of Mars to get at some of its extant and extinct habitability envelope both. And that, combined with increased knowledge on evolution of terrestrials and plate tectonics in terrestrials, gets at exoplanet habitability.

Strategically it clears the table on Discovery missions. The two rejects goes back into the pool, and it can be updated. Cassini's Caroline Porco is pushing for an Enceladus mission as the hottest astrobiology project out there, and I tend to agree.

Porco says the mission profile can get by with gravitational braking amongst Saturn's moons (no Titan aerobrake needed), and wants a rapid sampler without return. Landing a probe aside the jets after some sniffing and charting passes will enable pristine returning jetted samples to drop in, aside from surface collection of fresh ones.

Even at half the mass of Cassini (I'm guessing here), such a mission is perhaps not Discovery class even though the launcher cost is excluded (I think). But I doubt it is a Flagship mission either, or at least I hope so. If it is a New Frontier mission, the selection is in the 2013-22 range.

My main concern with the probe is that the possibility of ices will be a huge risk. It is a wedged probe that hammers itself down by an eccentric spring load mechanism. It seems it works well on regolith, but I doubt it can penetrate fossil ices.

Quote:

nSight will contain seismic instruments, heat-flow probes, and gravitational detectors, built by American (JPL), French (CNES), Swiss (ETH), British (Imperial), and German (DLR) laboratories. Together with a powerful drill, these instruments will provide data about Mars' shape, rotational wobble, internal temperature, and density.

The instrument not mentioned are antennas for positioning (seen on the longer of the InSight videos), which I guess would be needed trying to constrain Mars' wobble better than Opportunity will.

What NASA needs to start doing is providing a fixed common delivery/surface platform/comms system. With this once done engineering, it allows more money to be funneled into science packages. Packages can then be plugged into the platform and then launched to mars.

That is a good idea, but an ironic place to express it: InSight seems to have won because most of the sales pitch is in the reuse of the known platform and its still up to date team members. (It is in the longer InSight video.) They can guarantee the lowest risk, including economical risk, mission.

Which in NASAs current position is a win-win. The politicians wanted to force them to consider cost increase and now NASA can show they take responsibility. While at the same time NASA can more safely plan for the next, possibly more lenient, mission budget period.

MrMalthus wrote:

Sadly, this selection means that the other mission finalists were canceled, including the Titan Mare explorer, which would have been the coolest thing ever: landing in and then floating around one of Titan's liquid methane lakes.

Not canceled, the missions go back in the pool to draw from. Reformulated, most certainly, updated and/or more like the current winner (more affordable, less risky).

Phoenix was "meh" technologically, but it did it do a lot of great discoveries. Brines, near surface ices, perchlorates who as heat activated oxidants are both microbial energy sources and can predict the absence of organics in earlier pyrolyze based mass spectrometry.

I believe Curiosity now has a wet chemistry organics experiment as complement, to make sure we won't miss any organics. Or at least, I hope it has.